System Configuration for Railway Signalling and Interlocking Applications

Hi everyone,

I am a newbie in here. I am associated with a rail integrator company in Finland, which is specialized in providing EN 50126/50128/50129 SIL 4 solutions in railway signalling and interlocking. We have been using HIMA PLCs (HIMax and HIMatrix), HIMA's proprietary OS (of which I have no idea about) and HIMA's software platform SILworX for our applications. All of these are SIL 4 certified. Although we are pretty satisfied with HIMA's performances till now, we are also looking for some alternative solutions which are open. We are looking at the following possibilities:

Hardware: Artesyn's ControlSafe Platform / MEN Mikro Gmbh's MH50C

OS: VxWorks/QNX/PikeOS/Integrity

IDE: SCADE (Ansys), Flexisafe (Infoteam), Prover

I would love to have some opinions on these. Which ones would be better? Or any other alternatives, especially on software platforms (Matlab, Codesys?)

Thanks in advance!
 
hi argon,

HIMA kit generally has a very good reputation in the Petro-Chem industry, so no doubt likewise in the Rail/Transport sector.
I have not used either Artesyn or MEN Mikro's whilst in the rail industry which both are clearly targeted.

SIL4 is a very hard standard to achieve - have you attempted any calculations?

Have you looked very closely at the Certificates; equipment quoted may be capable of SIL rating only if surrounding periphery
is also capable of being rated (in this case including Software).

Not all Artesyn hardware is dual redundant, and I would suspect nothing less than 2oo3/triplicated fault tolerant hardware would
achieve SIL4 within a working system.

Likewise for MEN Mikro Gmbh's MH50C, which does claim 'up to SIL4' but has a Certificate which expressly excludes any power supply!

You should have independent auditors/Consultants within your company working in this environment. Perhaps you could provide extracts of their reports justifying such high ratings.
 
Hello Argon,

I'm from Smart Embedded Computing (formerly Artesyn Embedded Computing). If you still need some more info on our Control-Safe Platforms we would very interested in talking to you about the platform requirements for your signaling and interlocking solutions. Please find my contact info listed below.

Just to further address the response below, our control-safe platforms are SIL4 Certified and supports 2oo2 voting for the fail-safe computing architecture.

https://www.smartembedded.com/ec/assets/z10_16_08_87324_008_1472165697.pdf

https://www.smartembedded.com/ec/products/product/controlsafe-platform

Best regards,

Mark Stull | Sr. PreSales Solutions Architect| SMART Embedded Computing (formerly Artesyn Embedded Computing)
[email protected]
 
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